Rosa Brooks

Rosa Brooks holds the inaugural Scott K. Ginsburg Chair in Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where she also serves as faculty director of the Center for Innovations in Public Safety and the International Criminal Justice Initiative. She served previously as Georgetown Law’s Associate Dean for Centers and Institutes and as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs.

Brooks has combined law teaching and scholarship with stints in government service and a career in journalism and public service. From 2009-2011, Brooks served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. In July 2011, she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and she has been a consultant, advisor or board member for numerous non-profit organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, the Open Society Foundation and the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative.

Brooks has also served as an Adjunct Senior Scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute and an ASU Future of War Senior Fellow at New America, and she is a founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS) and the Democracy Futures Project. From April 2016 to November 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. In 2019, she received the Chief of Police Special Award.

Brooks spent four years writing weekly opinion columns for The Los Angeles Times and another four years writing a column on war and the military for Foreign Policy. Her articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. She is a co-founder of Deep State Radio, a weekly podcast on foreign policy.

Brooks’ 2021 book, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City (Penguin Random House) was named one of the Washington Post’s Best Books of 2021. Her 2016 book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster), was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016; it was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and named one of the five best non-fiction books of the year by The Military Times and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is currently working on a book about land, power and belonging in the American West.

Brooks earned her bachelor’s degree in History and Literature at Harvard, followed by a master’s degree in Social Anthropology at Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her JD from Yale Law School.